Islamic publishing houses in transformation The role of translation

Abstract

Translating Western classics into Turkish was always, both in the Ottoman Empire and in the Turkish Republic, closely linked with the idea of progress. Islamic publishers, which previously refrained from publishing translations of these classics, seem now to have discovered them. This article discusses the so-called "ideological distortions" found in these translations and debated in the Turkish press in 2006. It is argued that the movement of Islamic publishers from peripheral to central positions in the Turkish publishing market left traces not only in their publication lists, but also in their strategies of translating Western classical works - strategies that are not restricted to Islamic domestication. The article shows that source-text-oriented translations, too, can serve the expansion of the hegemony of Islamic circles in Turkish society.